How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival [Excerpt]

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This book excerpt traces the history of quantum information theory and the colorful and famous physicists who tried to figure out "spooky action at a distance"

By David Kaiser ?| January 30, 2012?|

Image: W. W. Norton & Company

Editor's Note: Reprinted from How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival by David Kaiser. Copyright (c) 2011 by David Kaiser. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Click here to see a Scientific American?video that explains quantum entanglement.?

[from Chapter 2, pp. 25-38:]
The iconoclastic Irish physicist John S. Bell had long nursed a private disquietude with quantum mechanics. His physics teachers?first at Queen's University in his native Belfast during the late 1940s, and later at Birmingham University, where he pursued doctoral work in the mid-1950s?had shunned matters of interpretation. The "ask no questions" attitude frustrated Bell, who remained unconvinced that Niels Bohr had really vanquished the last of Einstein's critiques long ago and that there was nothing left to worry about. At one point in his undergraduate studies, his red shock of hair blazing, he even engaged in a shouting match with a beleaguered professor, calling him "dishonest" for trying to paper over genuine mysteries in the foundations, such as how to interpret the uncertainty principle. Certainly, Bell would grant, quantum mechanics worked impeccably "for all practical purposes," a phrase he found himself using so often that he coined the acronym, "FAPP." But wasn't there more to physics than FAPP? At the end of the day, after all the wavefunctions had been calculated and probabilities plotted, shouldn't quantum mechanics have something coherent to say about nature?

In the years following his impetuous shouting matches, Bell tried to keep these doubts to himself. At the tender age of twenty-one he realized that if he continued to indulge these philosophical speculations, they might well scuttle his physics career before it could even begin. He dove into mainstream topics, working on nuclear and particle physics at Harwell, Britain's civilian atomic energy research center. Still, his mind continued to wander. He wondered whether there were some way to push beyond the probabilities offered by quantum theory, to account for motion in the atomic realm more like the way Newton's physics treated the motion of everyday objects. In Newton's physics, the behavior of an apple or a planet was completely determined by its initial state?variables like position (where it was) and momentum (where it was going)?and the forces acting upon it; no probabilities in sight. Bell wondered whether there might exist some set of variables that could be added to the quantum-mechanical description to make it more like Newton's system, even if some of those new variables remained hidden from view in any given experiment. Bell avidly read a popular account of quantum theory by one of its chief architects, Max Born's Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance (1949), in which he learned that some of Born's contemporaries had likewise tried to invent such "hidden variables" schemes back in the late 1920s. But Bell also read in Born's book that another great of the interwar generation, the Hungarian mathematician and physicist John von Neumann, had published a proof as early as 1932 demonstrating that hidden variables could not be made compatible with quantum mechanics. Bell, who could not read German, did not dig up von Neumann's recondite proof. The say-so of a leader (and soon-to-be Nobel laureate) like Born seemed like reason enough to drop the idea.

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